Relevance Judgments of Mobile Commercial Information Xiaolun Wang, Zhijuan Hong, Yunjie (Calvin) Xu, Chenghong Zhang, and Hong Ling School of Management, Fudan University, 670, Guoshun Road, Shanghai, China 200433. E-mail: {11210690029, 11210690023, yunjiexu, chzhang, hling}@fudan.edu.cn In the age of mobile commerce, users receive floods of commercial messages. How do users judge the rel- evance of such information? Is their relevance judg- ment affected by contextual factors, such as location and time? How do message content and contextual factors affect users’ privacy concerns? With a focus on mobile ads, we propose a research model based on theories of relevance judgment and mobile marketing research. We suggest topicality, reliability, and eco- nomic value as key content factors and location and time as key contextual factors. We found mobile rel- evance judgment is affected mainly by content factors, whereas privacy concerns are affected by both content and contextual factors. Moreover, topicality and eco- nomic value have a synergetic effect that makes a message more relevant. Higher topicality and loca- tion precision exacerbate privacy concerns, whereas message reliability alleviates privacy concerns caused by location precision. These findings reveal an inter- esting intricacy in user relevance judgment and privacy concerns and provide nuanced guidance for the design and delivery of mobile commercial information. Introduction Mobile devices such as tablet computers and cell phones are replacing personal computers as prevailing devices for people to access information. Users often receive permission-based mobile ads through short message service (SMS). The mobile marketing industry has seen an explosive growth in recent years. For example, Google acquired Admob, a mobile ads platform, in 2009, to deliver ads to mobile devices. According to eMarketer, the market for mobile ads is estimated at $2.6 billion in 2012 and $10.8 billion in 2016 (Snider, 2012). Given the growing amount of commercial information delivered to users, it is important to assess how users per- ceive such information. Particularly, how do users judge the relevance of commercial information? What are their privacy concerns when receiving commercial information? How do message content and contextual factors such as location and time affect relevance judgment and privacy? This study addresses these research questions. In short, we answer the question of what constitutes the ideal commer- cial message in terms of location and time. Extant research has conducted extensive investigations of information relevance judgments (Cosijn & Ingwersen, 2000; Saracevic, 1975; Schamber, 1994; Xu & Chen, 2006). Various factors have been found to affect relevance judgment such as document topicality, novelty, reliability, understandabilty, and scope (Xu & Chen, 2006). However, these studies focused on the evaluation of documents, either in their paper form or retrieved via search engines. Because mobile commercial information has unique factors, such as economic value, and because the delivery of information is often designed to suit specific location and temporal needs of users, it is important to have a new relevance model to explain users’ relevance judgment in such contexts. This study draws on three streams of research. First, we build on the relevance judgment literature to identify the antecedents of mobile commercial information relevance (MCI). Second, because we focus on commercial informa- tion, we supplement it with mobile marketing literature to identify commercial relevance factors. Finally, we draw on the privacy literature and investigate how the MCI relevance factors could have different effects on users’ privacy con- cerns. Integrating these three streams of literature, this study provides an explanation for (a) the antecedents of MCI rel- evance and privacy concerns, (b) the interaction between content design and contextual factors on MCI relevance and Received May 28, 2013; revised June 25, 2013; accepted June 26, 2013 © 2014 ASIS&T • Published online 26 February 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.23060 JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 65(7):1335–1348, 2014